I am a sucker for development kits/boards; they are cheap and if you have the room in your project they shave tons of room off your development time. Semi-recently, I was looking for a 18 or 20 PIC development board to plug into a main board. There are tons of boards that have various relays and switches and such but I wanted a bare-bones board that was good for bread-boarding and then could be plugged into my Sumo Roomba bot. These are shockingly hard to find for some reason? While I was sniffing around I ran into Jayson Tautic’s website which led me to purchase his 20-pin PIC development board on tinde. This thing was dirt cheap, and came remarkably fast! I put the thing together in a few moments and it sat in my “do-something-with-this-stuff” pile for a a few weeks. This kit comes with a 16F1509 which was great for what I was working on; it’s not-so-great if you still are rocking a PICKit2, it’s time to upgrade to the 3! I build out the “hello world” circuit shown below but in the end I went in a different direction and used a different board with an 18F2331. Did the board end up in the bottom of a drawer soon to be forgotten? (whats in there these days??: Cymbet energy harvesting stuff, a few 8 pin & 14 pin boards from piccircuit & micrcocontrollershop, a little 5/3.3V switcher kit, MMA7361, a few PICKit demo boards.. hmmm some other random stuff lower down) Nope! While hiking I decided it was destined for a greater purpose. I wanted to build my own barometer for “storm warning” while hiking the cascades this summer. I dug a BMP085 development board I purchased from Sparkfun earlier on this year and went to work; That code is coming along but isn’t quite finished. While working with this TAUTIC board I can say it is very clean, looks nice, and it’s rock solid. I highly recommend this dev board if you want to plop something down on your breadboard and hack away at.
If you’re interested in some of the basic code just to get it going, here is what I consider to be the important stuff to get you might like to use:
#include “p16f1509.inc”
__CONFIG _CONFIG1, _FOSC_INTOSC & _WDTE_OFF & _PWRTE_OFF & _CLKOUTEN_OFF
__CONFIG _CONFIG2, _LVP_OFF & _STVREN_ON
and…
INIT: ;General Init
BANKSEL ANSELA ;All Digital Pins
CLRF ANSELA
CLRF ANSELB
CLRF ANSELC
BANKSEL OSCCON
MOVLW 0x78 ;16MHZ Clock
MOVWF OSCCON
BANKSEL TRISC
CLRF PORTC
CLRF TRISC
BANKSEL 0x00
RETURN
